Yet it doesn’t take iconoclasts to deal in the unreal. In the U.K. we’ve had ‘ethnic minority arts’, ‘multi-ethnic arts’ and even Britain’s ‘non-British arts’ conjured up in what Colin Rhodes calls ‘a separate category and public-funding structure that seemed to define the role of the black artist from outside’. If the state abandons the arts to private patronage, it’s philistine; if it promotes ideals of the sublime and the beautiful it’s indulging elitism. So it shuffles its feet and welds aesthetics to social policy.

Of course art has long been commissioned to serve political ends, from statuary of ancient empires to perhaps the strangest job advert of the 2015 general election, which sought something called ‘Liberal Democrat Artwork’. Politics can consign art to the flames, but Augustus saved the Aeneid when its author wanted it burnt.

Yet somewhere on the way to modern times, instead of simply serving a faction or a cause, art became white or ethnic or indigenous (sorry, Indigenous), gendered or bourgeois or otherwise sodden with half-hidden social currents. Keen to appreciate art for art’s sake? You can find postcolonial theorists who’ll tell you the very notion is Eurocentric.

It’s not social criticism of art that’s disappointing. (Debates about cultural appropriation went on fairly soberly before Twitter discovered the term, and they address themselves to those looking to purchase ‘authentic’ Aboriginal art as well as to the Aborigine.) It’s social criticism in lieu of art criticism: attitudes towards ‘white art’ or ‘ethnic art’, which make as much sense as an attitude towards ‘winged things’ from birds to moths to aeroplanes.

After all, art can be dangerous. Suppose you did look properly at that painting; and suppose you felt transported with a glimpse into the artist’s vision, in a moment of transcendence beyond time and place and skin. Highly inconvenient, for certain political interests.